The northern road into Thornwell bled mud and dead leaves. A cold wind dragged through the skeletal elms, and the village hunched behind its low stone walls like a rabbit with its ears flat. The gates stood open. A mistake.

The carriage came anyway.

Ironbound, black as a freshly dug grave, four horses breathing steam and leaning hard against their traces. The black pennant snapped overhead, and the sound of it carried up the crooked lanes before the wheels even reached the gate. Stall shutters slammed. A woman dragged her child off the street. A dog skittered under a cart and went silent.

The Black Pennants had arrived.

A bad omen, the villagers would say later. But the real omen hadn't even stepped down yet.

The carriage door opened, and Capri descended first. He looked exactly like a man who expected to be argued with and intended to win. Green eyes swept the empty market square, the bolted doors, the watchful gaps in the shutters, and he smiled like a cat discovering the mice had already hidden. Took the filth long enough to get out of the cold. And now they've decided to be shy.

Vidar dropped out after him and landed with the heavy certainty of a falling anvil. He rolled his neck, scanned the empty street, and looked genuinely disappointed. No one's even tried to run yet. Fucking inconvenient. He grinned to himself. Maybe later.

Lamia came last, almost silent. She sniffed once, nose wrinkling, and then glanced toward the rooflines and the shadowed gaps between buildings with the detached interest of someone already mapping exits.

And then the carriage shifted.

Xavian emerged.

He did not step so much as unfold, boots hitting the mud with a sound like a blade being driven into a block. Six foot ten of cobalt-blue muscle and black leather and old scars. The market square wasn't deserted, not truly. It was just holding its breath while everyone decided if they could risk running.

His sword came with him. Always. The thing was taller than he was, a brutal curve of dark steel wrapped in leather and strapped diagonally across his back, and the way he moved suggested he'd forgotten it was there. Like breathing.

He looked up. Not at the village. Not at the closed doors or the distant cough of an unseen magistrate. He looked at the space around him like it had already disappointed him, and he hadn't even gotten started.

A door banged somewhere deeper in the village. A shutter latched hard enough to crack. The wind brought the smell of chimney smoke, wet straw, and something faintly rotted drifting from the fields to the east.

The Black Pennants stood in the middle of the empty road, the black carriage behind them like a promise of the next bad thing the village would have to survive.